I do, actually. Well, they're more partners than customers, since we give them our code and they sell it. But, yes, I have a lot of meetings with outside parties. We convince about half of them to join our Hangouts from their laptops, the others we add to the meeting via phone. Outside of meetings, we communicate entirely via e-mail. Voicemail is still irrelevant.

At IBM, my role was entirely customer-facing. Voicemail was still fairly rare, though teleconferences were the norm. Most communication was, again, via e-mail or face to face.

Learn from the past. Iraqui defectors swore up and down that there were massive nuclear programs. They were physicists, they were believable, they testified in secret, in public, on TV. None of it mattered, they were proven liars after we invaded.

Claims from defectors require extraordinary evidence, especially when what's coming out of their mouths is what the government or the intel agencies want to hear.

On the one hand you're talking about war profiteering, and on the other hand I think you're talking about a government-run helicopter operation, which typically is provided free of charge. I honestly do not understand your analogy here. I'm not suggesting that the army should charge people to airlift them out of disasters. I'm saying that private individuals who have no duty to respond to disasters be allowed to charge for doing so, which results in more assistance being provided rather than less.

Everybody is desperate. Without money we starve, freeze, and so on. The solution to that is basic income so that we can all afford to live, not to create shortages by pricing things below market value. There shouldn't be desperate people in the first place, and with taxes there is no reason we can't afford to take care of everybody.

They can just send a letter. Last time I checked you didn't need a plan to do that.

The problem with this is that US states are not allowed to interfere with interstate commerce, control immigration, etc. So, your model really only works if you have a very liberal mindset of anybody can possess anything they want to possess (no controls on drugs, guns, etc), and no significant amount of socialism.

If you want to ban all guns in your state, then you'll need border controls to prevent the flow of guns from states where they aren't completely banned. If you want to have strong worker protection laws in the manufacturing sector, then you need to be able to charge tariffs on goods produced elsewhere that did not have to comply with those laws. If you want to have basic income, then you need to be able to place tariffs on good produced in places that don't have basic income, and heavily tax anybody who wants to leave your state. All of these sorts of things are prohibited by the US constitution, which is why all these kinds of issues tend to become federal issues.

The same sort of logic is the reason why there aren't a lot of new painkillers. That and tort issues.

Painkillers save zero lives per year (directly - maybe you could make a hand-waving argument about suicide prevention or something like that). Even the most common and safest ones have some risk of serious side-effects, including death. Thus, looking at it in a simplistic manner, painkillers are almost never of medical benefit.

Now, when you get to quality of life then obviously painkillers make a lot of sense. The problem is that when one person in 10 million takes your pill and dies, and you get sued, you can't point to the millions of people who are happier as a result of taking your fancy pill and use that to justify the occasional death. The result is that people developing painkillers tend to abandon them early in development if there are any issues.

The result is that we have a rather poor selection of painkillers to choose from.

Whether North Korea was the sponsor or not, the hack doesn't appear to have originated there. Last I heard someone was pointing a finger at Thailand as the locale, but not at anything official. Speculation was that someone had been hired to do the job. Believe it if you want to, I don't really. I don't think anyone has enough evidence to come to ANY reasonable decision.

Well, just spinning a story here, but as I understand it North Korea threatened to sabotage South Korea's nuclear power plants. Around that time Obama stopped to have some conversation with some Chinese diplomats....perhaps about Korean relations? And soon thereafter North Korea got blamed quite publicly for a hack that may have been detected a bit before it was made public. Now North Korea's internet connections are sabotaged to keep them from intruding into South Korea's power plants, with China standing mum and not protesting, but the story about why this is going on has to do with this silly movie.

OK, it's just a story. But AFAIKT it is consistent with everything that happened.

FWIW, I believe that North Korea made some threats about sabotaging South Korea's Nuclear piles. That, to me, is a more credible reason for taking down their internet....if that's what happened. (That their internet went down is apparently true. That it was taken down externally I have heard no acceptable proof of.)

Do you even have any evidence that the folks who sent the threats were the same people as the ones who copied the files? Any good reason to believe it? Certainly it's a possibility, but I'd like some acceptable evidence before I start believing it. The unsupported word of someone in a position of authority isn't something that I consider acceptable evidence.

I'm willing to accept that North Korea *MIGHT* do such a thing and then not admit it. But the path from possibility to belief is not, for me, swift and certain.

There are a lot of things that I don't believe I have evidence to decide. This is one of them.

Tend to agree, though there could be another possible future. Nations get tired of this nonsense and start instituting border proxies. Maybe traffic is unrestricted between nations that agree to punish those who attack on other signatories, and refrain from government attacks (think US+EU and a few others). Countries that don't crack down on hacking get their traffic proxied, with only whitelisted protocols accepted (maybe strict html without javascript, plus images in specified formats chosen for simplicity and checked for standards-compliance, and email subject to a delay to allow for spam discovery and scanning/etc - perhaps without attachments). It would basically be the death of the internet as we know it, and obviously the usual suspects will be all for it.

When what happened to Sony starts happening to many major corporations there will be a lot of talk about changing how things work. From what I've read Sony's security seemed pretty typical for any large company - a firewall against incoming connections, and little else once you get inside. Companies aren't going to want to build a complex security infrastructure internally, let alone really strong measures like isolated networks - it costs a lot and is a lot less useful unless you punch a million holes in it (which diminishes the security). With regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley companies want to be able to account for every hour charged to every project and every mile expensed and every bolt ordered against the bottom line each quarter. Gone are the days when everybody just managed their department on a spreadsheet and cascaded the numbers up the levels. Then you have all the tax nonsense - governments don't like it when the value you declare to customs doesn't match the value you get when you finish doing all your double-irish whiskey with a shot of bermuda rum shell games, and good luck having that happen without about 14 layers of integration. Keep in mind the guys running all this IT stuff are in China next to the guys doing all the hacking on behalf of North Korea in the first place. :)

I'm sure that you think you have a point, but I haven't a clue as to what it is. Even as a troll this is sub-par. If you're trying to be serious you really need to think more about how to present your argument.

You are, I think, responding to the claim that you aren't noticing that many small changes can yield an important difference. What you intend your response to mean I find opaque.

What's a bomb? Seriously. An explosive device remotely explodable can be used in mining, or as a weapon. The exact same device.

Just refuse to allow anyone to be named Gatling.

(Well, I know that's not exactly a Gatling gun, but it's pretty close.)